Piers Morgan Likes Long Walks on the Beach With Rupert Murdoch

Larry King’s presumed successor Piers Morgan was on The Tonight Show last night, where he kept mum about any future job with CNN but was eager to sing the praises of his former boss Rupert Murdoch.

After making a joke about how his job at The Sun involved picking the topless Page Three girls—a joke that soared right over the heads of the Burbank audience—he went on to describe the romantic way he came to edit The News of the World.

I was the show business columnist at The Sun and then when I was 28, Rupert Murdoch flew me to Miami, walked me along Miami beach for two hours and then at the end of it he made me what was then the youngest newspaper editor for 50 years in Britain. So I had this scary moment when I had to go into The News of the World, the biggest selling newspaper in the world—still is I think—and I had to just try and pretend to be an editor.

He described Murdoch as a “great sort of mentor” to him saying it was even enjoyable to compete with the mogul when he eventually went to the Daily Mail. The New York Times may disagree!

Morgan earned points with the audience for saying that, hypothetically, were he to have his own talk show in the near future, he’s love his first guest to be Nelson Mandela. “At a time like now, when everyone’s at war, they could probably all do with an hour of Nelson Mandela,” he said to whoops and applause.